private dining

The business of remaining alive or not no longer concerns you. The group will decide the outcome, which is a relief because you have reached your limit with decisions. You stand on the corner of a familiar cobblestone street outside a restaurant with no obvious signage. Amber light and lively conversation lingers beyond its threshold. This looks like the kind of place designed to seduce you into the upper echelons of the wine list after the Côte de Boeuf is foisted upon you by an enthusiastic server.

“I wish I could have changed first,” is what you say to Elodie when she arrives. You are wearing a washed-out hospital tunic with the tactility of tracing paper and compression socks straining across your calves. Beside you is an intravenous drip on wheels which rattle across the uneven ground when you move. It's attached to your forearm, puncturing the tattoo of a forlorn cloud that you got when you were 19 and consciously tragic. You are half-marionette, tethered on one side, free on the other.

Naturally, she looks incredible. A Parisian bombshell in a sleeveless shift dress with knee-high boots that look capable of breaking both bones and romantic spirits. You remember saying that to her once, always desperate to entertain.

“How would you like to be seen?” she asks, but she’s not looking at you. Maybe she can’t. Maybe she finds it all très uncomfortable.

Like Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse wearing that black Givenchy dress? You think about saying. In passing, on a metropolitan street wearing some louche menswear look? Seen at all, perhaps.

“I don’t know, in something, me.” You say, as if the night would be off to a more auspicious start, if only you had worn a better outfit. You touch the ends of your hair and try to remember when you shampooed it. Your memories are misshapen and impossible to lasso.

“I over-accessorized though,” you cock your head towards the drip. Elodie does not laugh, but gives you a deliberate, doll-eyed blink.

“Sorry I'm late, girls. You're both into delayed gratification, right?” An unmistakable baritone makes Marc's presence known before you get a look at him.

“Need help with that?” he asks, coming close.

“I’ve got it,” you say and take an undetectable half-step back. “Are you coming from work?” you add, then wince at the absurdity of the question.

“It’ll be gin martini in there, will it?” he says and winks.

Mercifully, it’s as if you haven’t asked anything at all. It’s as if you two are at the beginning again. He is handsome, with a swashbuckler’s moustache and the air of someone moving through the world believing they are completely devastating.

***

Once inside, you move slowly, flanked by Elodie and Marc. You are aware of other diners, but their features are in Vaseline-focus, their voices shifted to one blissfully low pitch. The walls are dark and feature abstract illustrations of dismembered farm animals labelled with their correlating cuts of meat. Furniture is mismatched, belonging to different eras, and ornamented with oozing church candles. Ancient looking parlour palms and imposing pampas grass cast long shadows on the ceiling. At the mouth of a secluded area towards the back of the building, a display cabinet of vintage butcher knives separates the space from the main dining room. Here, modern music massaged into a late-1960s shape is being piped at generous volume and the sitar-heavy psychedelia makes you queasy.

“I wonder if the others are here yet?” Elodie shouts to Marc over the crown of your head. You think about how strange it is to watch them interact. They’ve never met, despite the final years of your romance with him overlapping your brief alliance with her.

“Is the gang all here?” he bellows and shame curdles in your throat.

A long table is set for six. The scene is what your mother would call high-end rustic: there’s pottery mottled in rainbow colours, ornate utensils and vibrant dahlias stuffed into milk bottles; their heads bent forward as though leaning in for a kiss. You sit beside an ice bucket at the head of the table and don’t make eye contact with anybody. Instead, you glance up to find a skylight and clusters of stars that shimmy beneath your gaze.

“I hoped you would choose that one,” Sam, your childhood best friend says from the seat beside you. You smile, preoccupied with making sure the tunic is covering your knees and using a butter knife as a makeshift mirror to check your lipstick. A beautiful woman on the internet claimed it was guaranteed to last at least 8 hours, and you think it must have been much longer than that by now.

Sam pours you a glass of something effervescent and clears his throat. Silence falls on the room and you wonder when he found his confidence. A by-product of becoming a parent you suppose, then realise you can’t remember the name of one of his sons.

“Shall we start?” there's an ease to how he pushes his voice out.

“We’re going to go around the table and talk about our relationships with her,” he is motioning to you. “Then we’re going to hear from her. How she’s going to help herself, if she wants to move forward from this.”

You study him, flourishes of silver in his beard, nose ring gone, relegated to the wild tales of youth his wife won’t ask about.

“I remember when she stopped taking her meds, cold turkey.” Anna, your ally from the retail-worker years says. “Surreal time in the store. It was tough to watch. She’s always been unpredictable, right?”

Anna is sitting opposite you in a cocktail dress with a high neck. Her dark hair is longer; but her face is the same, vulpine and unreadable. You met working in a boutique on a famous west London street that sold designer sunglasses. You were 22 and enjoyed being up close to the pursuit of personal style. Anna enjoyed having wealthy customers to rage against.

“Have you spoken to him?” You ask the room. “Is he here, too?”

“Him?” Anna says.

Everyone at the table is looking at you. Sam with a tenderness you fear might wind you.

“Jon,” you whisper. It should have been obvious.

“That didn’t take long. All she wants is him. He’s the reason for this, right?” Anna says, her accent settling into a transatlantic lilt you don't remember. “She thinks grief makes her special. Like it isn't universal.”

“So true. Let’s call a spade a spade,” Elodie adds and Marc snorts. You bet he wonders where she picked up that idiom.

“That's fair, I'm a little sister who wants to see her big brother again,” you say, only the room reacts like you have said fuck you.

“No, he isn’t part of this,” Sam says eventually. “The truly dead don’t communicate here, not with us tourists. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Then how does it work?” You ask and look at him in that honest way you used to.

***

Moments after Elodie has finished monologuing about how you extracted yourself from her life with no warning, the empty chair next to Anna is claimed by Rahim.

“College boyfriend, present and accounted for,” Anna says, squeezing his narrow shoulder.

“Yes, the one that got away, folks,” Rahim says and raises an eyebrow at you. He is wearing a taupe crewneck sweatshirt and a baseball cap embroidered with the words Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, which he promptly removes and places on the table. As he does, you catch a glimpse of a wrist watch and simple silver band on his ring finger.

“I was explaining how she dropped me like a hot rock,” Elodie says, draining her champagne flute with practised sensuality.

“A hot rock,” Rahim repeats and gives her a wan look, “she did that to me, too.”

“Hang on, is this dinner actually my roast? Only not a particularly funny one,” you say. “I thought you were all here to make an informed decision.”

Nobody reacts until Sam tilts his head forward as an invitation to continue.

“When do we start debating the pros and cons of life, or my life, more specifically?”

You wait for Marc to say what he always does. That, when rattled, you start behaving like you're in a play. But he does not.

You use your hands to scoop up sections of burrata and roasted peach from a platter in front of you and stare at the juices sliding pornographically down your wrist.

“I don't know what you're about to add, Rahim, but you met a girl at that house party who you actually wanted to fuck and forgot to tell me.”

“You met Marc at that weird temp job,” Rahim says and shrugs.

“See, she gets super intense about things. We were colleagues for like, 18 months,” Elodie says after a thick silence. “Friends too, sure. But did I have to tell her everything? I’m a private person, you know? I think if she wants to have relationships after this, then she’s going to need to relax about a lot of things.”

***

“And what about you, halterneck?” Marc asks Anna later.

Staff dressed in black have deposited bottles of Pét-Nat, bowls of rigatoni slick with pink sauce and an elaborate salad in the middle of the table. You are starving, but no one else appears to be.

“What about me, Burt Reynolds?” Anna says.

“Burt Reynolds? Christ,” he says, barely concealing what you recognise as reverence. Or perhaps you mean attraction.

“I want to know what the story was with you and her? I don’t think I ever asked.”

“You didn’t,” you say.

“Do you want to fill him in?” Anna asks, and you shake your head.

“We were colleagues too. Kids, really. No money, only opinions and shitty flats. Then one day we weren't. Paths diverged, different priorities and choices. It happens, it's boring. I met my wife, had our daughter and moved back home.”

“I relied on you too much,” you say, startled at your own candour. “I wanted to come and visit after everything changed. I asked if I could.”

“I think you idolised me a bit,” Anna says.

“Really humble,” Marc says, but she is disinterested in doing that dance with him.

“It was misplaced,” she says.

“More like a mentor situation,” you say, “And, by the way, married parents can interact with people who aren’t in that same club. Be honest, you didn’t like how he and I started. I think it shocked you.” You turn your palm towards Marc.

“Do you think a lot of your behaviour is shocking?” Anna asks and widens her eyes, allowing a quiver of emotion.

“Not particularly.”

“Life goes like that,” she says, surveying the faces around the table for reinforcement. “People come in and out, you lose touch, things move on, it’s completely normal.”

“You're all very wise,” you hiss.

“I feel really sad for you, babe,” she says and points a coffin-shaped acrylic nail at the IV bag.

***

In the interlude between the main course and dessert, you join Marc at a small, empty bar at the back of the room. He stands propped up on an elbow, nursing a crystal tumbler of something golden.

“Where did you get that from?” you ask, moving yourself round to the other side. It's as if you are the bartender and he the raffish regular.

“Witchcraft,” he says, and shakes the ice in his glass like he’s been asked to keep time. “So, go on then, out with it. What happened?”

“I was overwhelmed,” you say evenly, then realise what he's really asking is how, not why. “And it was pills. Barbiturates.”

“Ah, the classic for you people.” He says, smoothing out a frown.

“You people? Women, you mean?”

“M-hmm. Just like Monroe.”

“And you always said I’d never go through with it,” you say, baring your teeth enough to let him know you’re being gallows but in a cute way.

“Listen, my love, if you did this to prove a point to me,” he stops and leans in theatrically. You can smell his cologne, leather and bergamot and feel his mouth on your earlobe. “Then that is incredibly sexy.”

You push your fingertips into his bicep. Harder than would be considered playful. He is laughing and you are too, only no sound is coming out.

“Your life is your own to ruin.” he says, “And about Rahim – sharply dressed, by the way – I really do like him.”

“You’ve got things in common,” you lie.

***

There is an upright piano on the other side of the room and Rahim is playing the opening bars to The Long and Winding Road. Elodie is singing along in French, giggling each time he starts over. You move towards them, only it feels like falling. You sit beside him at the bench and study his hands on the keys.

“You had a keyboard,” you say.

“An electric piano,” he says with the cadence of an inside joke.

“Are you doing okay, Rahim? I miss talking to you.”

“I am. I’m sorry you aren’t. I always wondered.”

You survey the row of empty glasses and matchboxes lining the top of the piano and wonder when everybody drank so much. Elodie is turning one of the boxes between her thumb and forefinger, and you notice it's embossed with the word Favourites.

“Maybe I’ll smoke,” she says.

“You know, I once heard someone I had a crush on describe her as apocalyptically gorgeous,” you say, watching her leave.

“Like her face could cause an apocalypse? Apocalii, if we're going for the plural?” Rahim smiles.

“I guess. It's not actually that charming, is it.”

A banana split is placed under your nose, and you contort your body to find Sam beside you, holding another.

“We'll eat over there,” you tell him.

***

“What are you hoping we'll do?” Sam asks, swiping at glistening maraschino cherries with a sundae spoon.

“It’s not up to me,” you say. You wonder how it was decided that he would be foreman of this bizarre tribunal. He is well suited to it, a natural rule-follower, but quietly commanding. You think how good he must be at his job. How attractive his wife must find it.

“What does it feel like?” he says.

“The cannula?” you say, raising your arm up so that he might examine it. “I can’t feel it at all.”

“No,” he says and lightly taps your temple. “In there.”

“Oh,” you say, momentarily flummoxed, then ad-lib your way through a metaphor about making a home below a tidal wave.

You were a different sort of person when he knew you. There wasn’t the phantom limb of a sibling gone-too-soon. Men you thought you loved hadn’t yet been generous with their indifference and dogged with their secrets. There’s ice in her veins, brother, you can almost hear Marc telling Sam. You wish you could project your intervening years of life, home movie-style, onto a flat, white wall in his mind.

“It’s incapacitating,” you say. “Makes you feel grey. It tells you things, things that are cruel and warped. It knows all about you, particularly your weak spots. That's how it manipulates you.”

You watch him catalogue this.

“I really do understand,” he says. “So what about on the outside? What about life?”

“I don't love it,” you say with a caustic laugh. “Trying to find peace is tiring. Trying to find something I connect with is tiring.”

“Well, yes. We’re all dealing with varying degrees of that. But life could be long and unpredictable,” he says and gestures to Marc, who is still at the bar and talking to Anna. “Who is looking after you? That guy?”

“No, we’ve been apart for a while now,” you say, but can’t recall the exact number of months. “And anyway, he wouldn’t have had it in him. He finds this all a bit repulsive.”

“We're all we've got.” Sam says serenely. “I think the key is having an anchor of safety within ourselves first, don’t you think?” He rises to his feet, looks at you, then at an unopened bottle of port on the table.

“Last orders, everyone,” he says, “There’s a decision to be made.”

You lean into your chair, pushing your shoulder blades into the rattan, making it tilt up. You watch the group as they file back to their seats, catching the tail ends of conversations. You feel satiated and calm. Nothing is required of you.

Lauren is a writer fortunate enough to split her time between London and the Northamptonshire countryside. Her bylines include The Guardian, Vulture, Little White Lies and Stylist. Follow Lauren on Instagram @laurenpinnington.